Flores Bicolores by Suny Cardenas-Gomez

Flores Bicolores

Suny Cardenas-Gomez

I

’m walking home from school on an early spring Wisconsin day, still chilly enough to make me turn up the collar of my winter coat. Mygrandfather is kneeling in the front garden. Hewears a dusty black windbreaker and a floppy capwith woolly ear flaps. I’m climbing the steps to ourduplex when he calls me.“Suny,” he says, “ven aquí. ”In the garden, he shows me two bulbs.“Está raíz es de flores blancas,” he tells me, “yde esta salen flores rojas. Pero si las planto juntas,saldrán flores bicolores. Cuál quieres queplante?”

I’m surprised that he asks me. We aren’t veryclose, my grandfather and I. Maybe that is why heasks.“Planta las dos juntas,” I tell him.All summer, the bulbs wait in the sun-warmedearth. Our garden is not idle. The semicircle backyardof our plain brown-siding house is alwaysrugged with ungainly garden plants. The sloping

loams of pebbly soil are hedged in by short red bricks with wavy tops lodged into the soil.

My grandfather grows tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, chiles. In one corner, a red raspberry bramble runs wild, abuzz with bees and hornets. An uneven sidewalk weaves through the wilderness, echoed by the make-shift clotheslines crisscrossing just above my head. Anything from the worn-out rag that we use to mop our tile floors, drying stiff, to carefully washed gallon Ziploc bags could be hanging there.

Proudly, grandfather brings in his bounty – blotchy tomatoes, green-red peppers, eggplants swollen out of all proportion. The harvest is too abundant for my grandparents’ needs, and grandma brings us their surplus so that soon our kitchen, too, is full of irregular vegetables.

“Porqué planta tanto?” I ask my mother, exasperated. I have never known want. How different our lives have been.

Fall arrives and two stalky flower bushes, interwoven, are just beginning to unfurl their blooms. The blossoms are deep fuchsia, streaked with white.